Inequality by Economic Class in Rural Uttar Pradesh: A Picture of Affluence and Poverty

The period of economic reforms has been seen as one of increasing economic inequality both globally and in India. The World Economic Forum in its Global Risks Report 2012 and Outlook on the Global Agenda 2014 identified severe income disparities as a major threat to social stability within countries and on a global scale. Growing income and wealth inequality has become an issue of central importance today. This is reflected in the recent shift in World Bank’s perspective on economic development – a shift away from GDP growth per capita, towards the average income (or consumption) change of the bottom 40 percent of the people in a country. For the first time, World Bank’s longstanding goal of global poverty reduction has been accompanied by its new ‘shared prosperity’ goal which, by focusing on the least well-off in society, ‘explicitly brings income inequality to the forefront of the policy dialogue.’ (World Bank, 2015).